Prof. Jerzy Jankowski passed away on 18th of August, 2020 and this paper brings back this outstanding scientist, one of the most influential geophysicists in Poland and an extraordinary man. Considered a prime architect in the development of the geomagnetic observations in Poland, Prof. Jankowski was a giant in geophysics covering a wide range of problems, from the cognition of the deep basement in Poland and Central Europe to the studies of earthquake precursors. Besides research Prof. Jankowski also offered his administrative services to the Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, among others being its director for more than 30 years and also to the Polish Academy of Sciences as the Head of the Division of Earth and Mining Sciences for nearly a decade. Prof. Jankowski received many significant honors during his life; internationally, he was recognized as a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The study aimed to examine the use of Geomagnetic Anomaly Detection (GAD) to locate the buried ferromagnetic pipeline defects without exposing them. However, the accuracy of GAD is limited by the background noise. In the present work, we propose an approximate entropy noise suppression (AENS) method based on Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) for detection of pipeline defects. The proposed method is capable of reconstructing the magnetic field signals and extracting weak anomaly signals that are submerged in the background noise, which was employed to construct an effective detector of anomalous signals. The internal parameters of VMD were optimized by the Scale–Space algorithm, and their anti-noise performance was compared. The results show that the proposed method can remove the background noise in high-noise background geomagnetic field environments. Experiments were carried out in our laboratory and evaluation results of inspection data were analysed; the feasibility of GAD is validated when used in the application to detection of buried pipeline defects.